Repository conversations

Abstract

For a long time, informal communication has played an important role in the process of creating and sharing scholarly knowledge. However, only a handful of initiatives have seriously attempted to exploit the advantages of informal communication processes as a complement to the classic mechanisms of scholarly communication. This article describes the developments that resulted from the DSpace-dev@University of Minho project, particularly, the ones that focus the Commenting add-on: an extension developed for the DSpace platform which aims at providing Institutional Repositories with informal communication capacities. The article also alludes to some ideas that can be taken as the basis for future developments about this subject, namely: to transform the current add-on into a cross-repository and cross-platform service; to make each comment have its own descriptive metadata in order to facilitate its discovery by search engines; and to improve significantly its graphical user interface.